by Timothy Zahn
"We all care," Lathe said. "It's not too late even now to get back into the fight."
"Alone?" Bernhard snorted. "Dead or deserted, I've lost what's left of my team."
"You were trained to be able to fight alone," Lathe reminded him. "And there are organizations like Torch all over the world you could link up with. You're a valuable quantity, Bernhard—I'd hate to see you throw yourself away."
The other held Lathe's eyes for a long moment. "It's you, Comsquare, who's throwing himself away.
You'll never get off this planet, you know, and if Quinn doesn't get you the Security chief in the next city will. You're dead, Lathe—all of you are. Remember that, Kanai. Remember it when the Security troops are moving in on you... and remember that I kept you alive and healthy in enemy territory for thirty years."
Kanai didn't reply, and after a moment Bernhard turned to the tunnel entrance. "Before you go,"
Skyler said, holding a folded piece of paper out toward him, "you'll need this."
Bernhard frowned down at the paper. "What is it?"
"Your departure pass," the big blackcollar told him. "Mordecai's guarding the entrance, remember?
He won't let you leave alone without this."
Bernhard spat a curse in reply. "I suggest you take it," Lathe said mildly. "Mordecai's a better fighter than any of us, including you... and he takes his orders very seriously."
Bernhard snatched the paper out of Skyler's grip and, without another word, disappeared down the tunnel.
Caine took a deep breath. "I hope there's no way he can set up any booby traps on his way out."
"There won't be," Lathe assured him. He nodded, and with an answering nod Skyler slipped into the tunnel behind the departing blackcollar.
"Bernhard will spot him," Kanai murmured.
"Perhaps," Lathe said. "But he won't do anything about it. Come on, gentlemen—let's finish this project and get the hell out of here."
—
"No other conclusion?" Lathe asked, his eyes flicking between Hawking and Caine.
Caine shook his head wearily. "It's not listed on any file we can access. The code-check program Hawking wrote can't find any overlaid codes of the sort we found in the Plinry archives. There's no hard-copy data anywhere we can get to.
"The Backlash formula simply isn't here."
Lathe sighed, and for a long moment the room was silent. "Well," he said at last, "that's the way things go sometimes. The universe doesn't give any guarantees that there are even answers to the questions we ask, let alone that we can find them."
Hawking stirred. "I take it, then, that the Torch drug is not, in fact, Backlash?"
"I wish we knew," the comsquare said. "We've gone through every scrap of documentation we could find—we've got the calculated dosage amount, the formula, the manufacturing sequence, and even the estimated lifespan of the drug. But as to its purpose, not a whisper. Apparently they didn't think it necessary to mention that, as if anyone likely to find it would already know what Whiplash referred to."
"Then maybe Anne Silcox will be able to tell us something," Hawking suggested.
"Maybe," Lathe said. "Assuming she and Reger did indeed survive the attack Bernhard called down on them, which is by no means certain. I've been thinking we might do a quick test before heading back there, just to see if the stuff does anything obvious."
"No," Caine said firmly. "Absolutely not. Pittman's already suffered more than his fair share for this mission, I'm not having you risk his life with some witch's brew a group of fanatics came up with."
"Agreed," Lathe said. "But who said anything about testing the stuff on Pittman?"
Caine stared. "You mean... you?"
"Do I look crazy?" the other countered. "I'd prefer to use someone a little more expendable. Come on, let's get the gear packed up. If we hurry, we should be able to make it back to Reger's tonight."
—
The first thing Miro Marcovich noticed as he drifted toward consciousness was that somewhere his body was hurting like hell.
It took a while longer for the pain to localize into his neck, and as it did so the rest of the sensations began falling into place. He was lying on his back on a prickly surface... his left arm inexplicably bare... and there were footsteps and murmurs of conversation around him. Did I faint? he wondered, searching his mind for a clue as to what had happened. But the last thing he could remember was standing outer sentry duty in the woods surrounding Ivas Trendor's mountain home. Carefully, wary of hurting something else, he opened his eyes—
And nearly had a heart attack. Standing and milling around within his view were a half-dozen men, but not in the Security uniforms he'd expected to see. Dressed in civilian clothing, with black shirts peeking through at the open necks. And their faces—
Instinctively, his right hand twitched toward his paral-dart pistol, even though he knew the holster would be empty. Perhaps the emergency alarm on his belt—
"How do you feel?" one of his captors asked, kneeling down beside him.
Marcovich sighed with defeat and let his hand drop back to his side. "My neck hurts where you hit me," he said. "I'm... surprised I'm still alive. If you're hoping to get some inside information about Trendor's place, you can forget it—I'm not talking."
"What's a Trendor's place? Never mind—we're not here for information. And we're not going to kill you, either. At least I don't think we are."
Marcovich grimaced. "Oh, that's comforting. Really." His eyes flicked away from the face he'd seen so often these past days on Trendor's guardroom wall, over to where his laser rifle was resting against a tree. His communicator and emergency alarm were piled around it, along with the rest of his weapons and other gear. So near. "When does the final decision get made?"
"Right now," a new voice broke in.
Marcovich looked back just as a hypospray tingled against his arm. He frowned—and then gasped as a red-hot flame seemed to course up the limb. "Damn," he breathed. "What're you doing to me?
What is that?"
"To be perfectly honest, we don't know," the second man—Hawking, the name drifted up from his memory—said, frowning at a medical reader already strapped around Marcovich's upper arm. "We needed someone to test it out on, and as long as you Security people were hanging around the mountains doing nothing anyway, we thought we'd borrow one of you for a while."
The fire was pouring like slow lava into Marcovich's chest now, and a mottled haze was beginning to creep across his vision. His muscles trembled uncontrollably; with an effort he licked dry lips and wound up nearly biting his tongue. "How do you feel?" Hawking's voice came dimly to his ears.
"Like I'm dying," Marcovich managed to snap. Maybe there wasn't any way to stop them, but he was damned if he was going to cooperate with them. "Go away and let me die in peace."
"Well?" the other blackcollar asked.
Hawking shook his head slowly. "Sorry, Lathe. I remember well enough what kind of reaction the...
proper stuff caused. This isn't it."
"Damn." Lathe gazed down at Marcovich, and even through his own haze of agony Marcovich was struck by the depth of raw disappointment on the other's face. "You're sure?"
Hawking didn't even bother to answer, and after a minute Lathe seemed to pull himself together.
"Well, then, what is it doing to him?"
"Damned if I know." The other shook his head. "I don't think he's dying—his vital signs are holding steady—but beyond that I haven't even got a clue."
A third man stepped up to Lathe. "What's the word?" he asked, his voice practically dripping with suppressed eagerness.
"Apparently, it's no," Lathe said. "I'm sorry."
The disappointment that Marcovich had seen moments earlier on Lathe's face appeared on the newcomer's. "You sure? I understood several injections were necessary—"
"But there should be a particular physiological reaction on even the first one," Hawking said gently.
"It's simply not there.
"
"And you'll remember the instructions specified a single dose, anyway," Lathe said. "Still, there's one more thing we can try."
Abruptly, a fist snapped out at Marcovich's face. He twitched away, trying to bring his rebellious arm up to defend himself; but even before he'd moved the punch had stopped centimeters away from his nose. "No." Lathe shook his head, withdrawing his hand. "No enhancement at all."
The third man took a deep breath. "Yeah. Well... we'd better be moving along, then, hadn't we?
Eventually someone's going to miss him."
Lathe frowned. "Hawking?"
"I think he's going to be okay," the other assured him. "It'll be several more minutes before he can go anywhere, but the initial reaction's already passing. He's not going to die out here, if that's what you're worried about."
"I was," Lathe acknowledged. Briefly, his right hand clutched at his left wrist. "All right, get moving. I'm going to gag you and tie your feet together," he added to Marcovich, producing a cord from somewhere. "By the time you can get loose, we ought to be long gone."
Marcovich nodded understanding as the two others disappeared off into the underbrush. Already the fire in his blood was fading away, and with it the immediate fear of death. "I didn't think you blackcollars cared about people like me," he told Lathe, struggling to get the words out.
"We don't," the other said flatly, busying himself with the cord. "At least, not very much. But we don't kill even Security men indiscriminately, and certainly not when it isn't necessary. Though I doubt you'd show similar restraint."
Marcovich thought it over, decided it wasn't worth lying about. "No, I wouldn't," he admitted.
Lathe grunted and finished his work in silence. Carefully, Marcovich tried moving his arms, but it was clear that his muscles were still a long way from full control. The blackcollars were going to get away... unless...
"By the way, my men took the batteries out of your communicator and emergency beacon when they picked you up," Lathe said, getting to his feet and inspecting his handiwork. "Same for your laser.
We thought your friends might try to track you that way once they noticed you were missing. Of course, you can try to get back and alert them, but since you don't know where you are, I wouldn't recommend it. My suggestion is to just sit here and enjoy what's left of the sunshine until they come to find you."
Marcovich gritted his teeth, his last brief surge of hope evaporating. "You blackcollars read minds, too?"
Lathe smiled faintly. "It's how we survive. Thanks for your help, Security man."
"Marcovich is the name," he said, moved by an only dimly understood desire to be more than just another gray-green uniform to this man. "Miro Marcovich."
Lathe nodded to him. "Thanks for your help, Marcovich," he said. Producing the gag—a length of permatape—he carefully applied it across Marcovich's mouth and around behind his neck. Then, turning away, he disappeared behind the trees.
And Marcovich was alone.
It took him the better part of an hour to get enough fine-motor control back to untie his feet. A quick inspection of his equipment showed the blackcollars had indeed left him no way to signal the rest of the Security cordon, and a few minutes of careful reconnoitering confirmed that he hadn't the vaguest idea as to which way Trendor's grounds were. And a permatape gag he knew better than to try to remove without the proper solvent.
With a tired sigh, he found a flat rock and propped himself up against it. There'd be a search party out eventually, and he wouldn't be that hard to find. Though they probably wouldn't be fast enough to catch the blackcollars and find out what the hell they'd injected him with.
Behind the permatape, he grimaced. Deep within him, he could feel the drug churning and grinding, tearing at his system like a canal digger. Changing his whole being... and gradually he came to realize that Lathe had been wrong.
The stuff was indeed going to kill him.
Leaning back against the rock, he closed his eyes and waited for the search party to come.
Chapter 40
Anne Silcox was waiting in a faint pool of starlight outside Reger's mansion as the two cars drove up. "The gate guards called and told us you were back," she said as Lathe got out and trudged with the others up the steps. "I was hoping to talk to you—when you have time, of course."
Lathe nodded and took her arm. "Let's go inside," he said. Signaling Skyler to take the others back to their quarters, he led Silcox in the other direction to the quiet and privacy of the main living room.
"Reger told me you were going to try and get inside Aegis Mountain," she said as they sat down on a couch together. "I... did you... meet anyone?"
Lathe rubbed his forehead tiredly. "I'm sorry, Anne, they were all dead when we got there. A couple of months ago, from the looks of things."
She took a deep breath, swallowed visibly. "I didn't lie to you," she said quietly. "I really didn't know where they'd all gone. It wasn't until Reger told me where you'd headed and I had time to think... Did you find out why they were there?"
"Yes and no," he said. "They were manufacturing a drug called Whiplash, but we never figured out what it was supposed to do. Does the name mean anything to you?"
Her eyes seemed to come back from somewhere else. "No, not really," she said dully. "They sometimes talked about Whiplash as a sort of sky-pie breakthrough that was supposed to free Earth from the Ryqril. But of course most of the projects had that as their goal. How... how did they die?"
"They were poisoned by leftover gas from the war." Easing the pack off his shoulders, Lathe leaned back onto the couch and closed his eyes. He was tired—more tired than he could ever remember being since the end of the war itself. So much for retirement, he thought, half bitterly. The last of the blackcollars. Maybe Bernhard was right, after all. Maybe we're the ones throwing our lives away for nothing....
"You realize, I hope, that you're making a mess of my couch."
Lathe opened his eyes. "Hello, Reger. Nice to see you alive."
The other grunted as he sat down in a chair across from them. "Yes, I'm rather pleased to be that way myself."
"Tell me about it."
"About the way Jensen said it would happen," Reger said with an uncomfortable shrug. "Five of them came in, two nights ago, right along the keyhole path and loaded for mountain lion." He shook his head in memory. "I tell you, Lathe, it was the goddamnedest thing I've ever seen. Like shooting cats in a box. They never even had a chance."
Lathe sighed. "If you expect me to be proud about it, you're going to be disappointed. Blackcollars shouldn't die like that."
"But it wasn't your fault, was it?" Silcox frowned. "I mean, it was Jensen who set the death house up and Reger who suckered Bernhard's men into it. You shouldn't feel guilty about it."
"Leaders are responsible for what their men do," Lathe told her. "You'll understand that someday.
Especially now that you're in charge of Torch."
"Me?" She looked startled.
"Who else? Someone's got to rebuild the organization, and you're the most reasonable candidate.
Though if it helps any, you probably won't have to start exactly from level zero. Isn't that right, Reger?"
Reger scratched at his ear. "I don't know, Lathe. You're talking a hell of a lot of risk for not much gain. I'm in this business for the money and power, not to play Quixote for the nobility of it all."
"What about the power that'll be available when the Ryqril are thrown off Earth?" Lathe said.
"You'll be in a clear position to grab some of that when it happens."
"If it happens," the other countered. "You don't have to go through all the arguments again—I remember them well enough. It's just that I don't see a hell of a lot of indication the roaches are busy packing their bags."
"Wait a second," Silcox said. "If you're talking about me linking up with Reger's streetlice operation, you can forget it. I've got higher standards than that."
"You can't afford to be c
hoosy," Lathe told her bluntly.
"What, you think you and Kanai can start things up all by yourselves?"
"Kanai? Who said I was going to take him on, either?"
"Listen to her." Reger snorted. "This is the patriot who's going to lead all of us to freedom? You have to submit a full pedigree to even get in on the revolution."
Silcox glared at him. "I can find more trustworthy teammates than you under the rocks in your yard," she growled. "I may be young and inexperienced, but I'm capable of managing without you, thanks."
Lathe sighed. "Anne, don't be ridiculous. Maybe Reger's current organization won't work, but he's got the contacts and information net to both find the people you need and to pull in all the other data a successful resistance group has to have. You, on the other hand, know more about the basic techniques of undercover operations than he does—and you've got access to the Torch safe houses, where I'd bet heavily there are some duplicate records and material hidden. Kanai, along with his obvious blackcollar training, knows where the back door to Aegis Mountain is if and when you ever find a real use for the place."
"In other words," Reger said heavily, "you're saying that together we're a reasonable team, but singly we're just spinning our wheels. I suppose I agree—but only if all of us have the same goal. You still have to convince me there's something in all of this for me. Spectacular political assassinations are fine in their place, but as a means of throwing the Ryqril off the planet I doubt they're all that effective."
"Who's talking assassinations?" Lathe frowned. "I'm talking operations against Security forces and government installations."
"Yes, and you've proved your point," Reger said. "But remember that you had a whole flock of blackcollars on hand to help you infiltrate Trendor's house—"
"To infiltrate what? Trendor who?"
"He's the former Security prefect you assassinated this evening," Silcox said. "Didn't you even know his name?"
Lathe stared at her, shifted his gaze to Reger. "What are you two talking about? We didn't kill anyone this—"
And suddenly it all clicked. "My God," he whispered. "My God.—Reger give me the details. What exactly happened to this Trendor?"